A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy. Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would...

A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned. The same team took the first-ever single-molecule image in 2009 and more recently published images of a molecule shaped like the Olympic rings. The new work opens up the prospect of studying imperfections in the "wonder material" graphene or plotting where electrons go during chemical reactions. The images are published in Science. The team, which included French and Spanish collaborators, used a variant of a technique called atomic force microscopy, or AFM. AFM uses a...

A narrative has developed over the past several years that the Republican Party is anti-science. Recently, thanks to the ignorant remarks about rape made by Rep. Todd Akin, the Democrats have seized the opportunity to remind us that they are the true champions of science in America. But is it really true? No. As we thoroughly detail in our new book, "Science Left Behind," Democrats are willing to throw science under the bus for any number of pet ideological causes – including anything from genetic modification to vaccines. Consider California’s Proposition 37, which would require genetically modified food to carry...

Speed of light may have changed recently 19:00 30 June 04 The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth. The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants. A varying speed of light...

Astroboffins have spotted a galaxy cluster that's breaking all the cosmic rules, including coming back to life to spawn stars at an enormous rate. The Phoenix cluster is spewing out the celestial bodies at the highest rate ever observed for the middle of a galaxy cluster; it's the most powerful producer of X-rays of any known cluster; it's one of the most massive of its kind; and the rate of hot gas cooling in the central regions is the largest ever observed. According to the scientists, the cluster is "experiencing a massive starburst" that's forming the equivalent of 740 Suns...

Scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider say they just temporarily created the hottest man-made temperature by colliding two lead ions. According to a source working on the project, the collision sprung loose a plasma "soup" of sub-atomic gluons and quarks at an estimated temperature of 5.5-trillion-degrees Celsius. We won't know just how hot the plasma was for at least a few weeks because the measurements are very delicate and have to be converted to degrees. The consensus seems to be that it will shatter the previous record, which was about 4 trillion degrees.The craziest thing is that this might not...

A group of physicists at the University of Glasgow is claiming a first: taking photos of entangled photons. In this paper in Nature (hooray for free access!), they explain that their 201 x 201 pixel images captured around 2,500 different entangled quantum states. The entangled photons were imaged using different lens configurations to capture correlations of position and momentum – the characteristics (to shorthand Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) that mutually preclude excessive knowledge about a given quantum system. From the 100,000 images taken by their setup (pictured*), the scientists say they were able to observe 2,500 states which they described as...

ANN ARBOR — Astrophysicists have detected, for the first time, the oscillating signal that heralds the last gasps of a star falling victim to a previously dormant supermassive black hole. Led by researchers at the University of Michigan, the team documented the event with the Suzaku and XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescopes. These instruments picked up semi-regular blips in the light from a numerically-named galaxy 3.9 billion light years away in the northern constellation Draco the dragon. The blips, scientifically known as “quasiperiodic oscillations,” occurred steadily every 200 seconds, but occasionally disappeared. Such signals have often been detected at smaller black...

The matter-eating beast at the center of the Milky Way may actually account for Earth's existence and habitabilityAdapted from Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos, by Caleb ScharfOur existence in this place, this microscopic corner of the cosmos, is fleeting. with utter disregard for our wants and needs, nature plays out its grand acts on scales of space and time that are truly hard to grasp. Perhaps all that we can look to for real solace is our endless capacity to ask questions and seek answers about the place we find ourselves...

In 1964, physicist Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh proposed that the infant universe (as in, perhaps a trillionth of a second old) experienced... a phase transition. In much the way an iron bar can suddenly become a magnet when cooled below a certain temperature, space itself acquired a new feature. Instead of a magnetic field, space was filled with a new forcelike field -- since named for Higgs. Other physicists worked out similar scenarios at about the same time, and later work showed how the Higgs phase transition could explain the distinct identities of two of nature's basic...

Notes from a parallel universe Inside the X-files at the University of California at Berkeley, the line between theory and fantasy, science and supposition, starts to dissolve. The authors of these dissertations are obsessed—and scientists are nearly as obsessed with them Eleven years ago Eugene Sittampalam was sitting in a hotel room on the Libyan coast when he stumbled, as if by fate, on the unified field theory of physics. "I was on an engineering project at the time, with hardly any social life," he says. "I would retire to my room after dinner. I would switch on the radio,...

The Telegraph ^ | 3/27/2010 | Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Olga Krepysheva in St. Petersburg

Inside the world of Grigory Perelman: the man who solved the world's toughest maths problem proves to be a puzzle himself. He has been called "the cleverest man in the world" and shook academia to its foundations when he announced he had solved a fiendish mathematical problem that had baffled the planet's best brains for a century. Yet Grigory Perelman, a 43-year-old Russian mathematician, has consciously spurned plaudits and wealth to subsist like a hermit. He lives in a 2-bedroom flat with his elderly mother in a dilapidated Soviet-era tower block in St. Petersburg, while neighbours complain that his own...

Baffled by the expansion of the universe? You're not alone. Even astronomers frequently get it wrong. The expansion of the universe may be the most important fact we have ever discovered about our origins. You would not be reading this article if the universe had not expanded. Human beings would not exist. Cold molecular things such as life-forms and terrestrial planets could not have come into existence unless the universe, starting from a hot big bang, had expanded and cooled. The formation of all the structures in the universe, from galaxies and stars to planets and Scientific American articles, has...

Scientists preparing to fire up the world's largest atom smasher are being flooded with phone calls and emails – even death threats – from people worried that the Large Hadron Collider, when activated, will obliterate planet Earth.

A simulation of the early universe using string theory may explain why space has three observable spatial dimensions instead of nine. The leading mathematical explanation of physics goes beyond modern particle theory by positing tiny bits of vibrating string as the fundamental basis of matter and forces. String theory also requires that the universe have six or more spatial dimensions in addition to the ones observed in everyday life. Explaining how those extra dimensions are hidden is a central challenge for string theorists... In the simulation, the universe starts off as a tiny blob of strings that is symmetric in...

(25) Millenium simulation from Volker Springel et al., from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. Â“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.Â” -Stephen Hawking The Universe is a vast, seemingly unending marvel of existence. Over the past century, weÂ’ve learned that the Universe stretches out beyond the billions of stars in our Milky Way, out across billions of light years, containing close to a trillion galaxies all told.Image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team. And yet, thatÂ’s just the observableÂ Universe! There are good reasons to believe that the...

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the oldest known spiral galaxy, a 10.7-billion-year-old anomaly that by all rights shouldn't exist. The galaxy was present in the early universe, about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, at a time when galaxies were still forming and normally looked clumpy and irregular. … In fact, it is a so-called grand design spiral galaxy, which has prominent, well-formed spiral arms. "The fact that this galaxy exists is astounding," Law said. "Current wisdom holds that such grand design spiral galaxies didn't exist at such an early time in the history of the...

As the author of these columns describing cutting edge physics and astronomy, I get quite a few letters and E-mail from readers who are more interested in ?over-the-edge physics and astronomy?. One recurring theme is various alternatives to the standard model of Big Bang cosmology. Perhaps the universe is not expanding; it?s just that light ?gets tired? on its path from far away and loses some of its energy. Perhaps quasars are closer than we think, particularly since some of them appear to be linked to closer galaxies. Perhaps relativity is wrong, and it?s the speed of light that is...